I will take the liberty of giving the phrase “free teachings” a
meaning expanded to include a philosophy of not withholding valuable
lessons and skills learned. This was a philosophy I had to force
myself to adopt, and it was only facilitated by relinquishing the old
philosophy I had learned, that of clinging to knowledge fearfully,
worried that someone might take advantage of me if I were to share
it. The timing of this change in thinking was significant, for
reasons I won’t fully go into here, but it was at a time in my life
when I needed to let go of such clinging, fearful thinking in leaps
and bounds in order to attain/maintain sanity, so pulling my head out
about sharing knowledge went right in step with the larger path I was
and am walking. So begins a little bit of the story of how I got from
there to here.
My work history began in the very competitive area of Soutwestern
jewelry manufacuring in the Southwest U.S. in the early 1970’s in
what were effectively ‘Indian’-jewelry fabricating sweatshops. The
height of the boom, but still relatively low-tech, back when
everybody used asbestos pads for soldering and nobody used
ventilation. Some, or a lot, of the mentality I adopted was because
of the particular people running the places I worked for, but I
worked for enough of the same kind of company to know that the
mentality was not necessarily atypical. Manufacturing trade secrets,
of course, were often guarded, and I know that there are perfectly
good reasons for, and a proper place for some of that kind of
thinking.
I worked for places that stole designs from each other, that were
always fearful about the competitive advantage being lost (or
stolen), and I worked next to people afriad of sharing their
knowledge and abilities with me for the same reasons, and to some
degree I became like that.
This sort of secretive, fearful mentaility carried over into when I
started making pancake dies for people, and I was still
living/working in the same geographical area, doing work for some of
the same people that used to be my employers. This was around the
same time (late 1980’s ) when I went through a lot of personal
upheaval (crash and burn, then arise, Phoenix-like, from my own
ashes), when things were changing, and I remember one day in
particular, 1992-ish, when things changed a lot. It was a phone call
from some guy in California (master blaster Lee Marshall) who had
heard of me and wanted to find out if I was interested in teaching a
class that he would put on at his shop in Santa Cruz. I wasn’t sure
what to think at first, because the old fears kicked in : “what if
someone takes all my ‘secrets’ and takes over my market niche?”,
that kind of thing. I remember telling my mother about it after I
had agreed to go teach, and her first reaction was the exact same
thing, but it was to o late; the seeds of change had already been
planted and were about to growin ways I didn’t imagine at the time.
I’ll skip the novella-sized chapter about my mother issues, except
to add that she was the same mother who encouraged me to stop trying
to make a go of the diemaking thing, before it had taken off. That
book (to borrow from Douglas Adams) should be titled ‘So Long, And
Thanks For All The Fish’.
So I went to California to teach a two-day ; my first experience
teaching anything, one of my first times having to speak
authoritatively in from of other people about anything, and most
importantly, my first real exposure to a world of metalsmithing
artists ouside the very narrow confines that I had allowed myself to
become trapped in. Looking back, it was quite a significant event,
because it helped change the way I viewed myself in the world of
work, and changed how I looked at the community (not that I really
had thought of there being one the way I think of it now) of
metalsmithing artists.
Then, there I was, in the middle of a group of people who were
operating pretty much the from polar opposite of the sort of
mentality that had become second nature to me, and my goodness, what
a relief it was to find out that this was the bigger reality in the
world of craft and artisanry. An ‘outside world’ populated with a
friendly, non-secretive, non-throat-cutting
species that seemed determined to share and expand knowledge freely.
I remember that one of the first big companies in Albuquerque I did
dies for in 1986 actually had the gumption and audacity to try and
get an exclusive on my services; not hire me outright, no, just try
and get me to not do dies for their local competition. That was an
absurd idea even to the old me, the pre-head-out-of-sand me , and
typifies the unfortunate mindset of some people in the industry.
There was another jewelry workshop I remember vaguely from the
earliest of the 1990’s, at someone’s house whose name I should
remember, where I was asked to go give a little die demo at, in
Corrales, NM, and I did another class for Lee, and was glad to
become a cog in the big machine of things. It felt very good and was
rewarding to let goof parts of my old self, and in part of the same
process, disperse parts of my experience to others, if not exactly
free of charge, then at least with the intention and goodwill of a
cooperative spirit and willingness to share knowledge for the
benefit of all. Teaching isn’t really my thing, and I’ve generally
always been too busy working to put much effort in to going around
teaching, and fortunately, since basic pancake chemistry is not
rocket science, there are lots of people here and there who include
the basics in some of their jewelry making classes.
Always, either up front or on a way-back (back to the future)
burner, is the inevitability of writing the Encyclopedia Pancakea,
not just a few Utoob videos or a book done with (read : ‘by’ someone
else) but a real, excruciatingly-detailed immersion into the art of
RT die making, the Foundation (Trilogy ?, no! ) of Flapjackkery, as
it were or will be. There’s no reason to take my ‘secrets’ to the
grave; nobody ‘over there’ would find much use for them, and there
are things I’ve discovered that some people here will find useful
someday. Someday… and it will be about ‘free’ teaching motivated
by the need to contribute to the knowledge base, instead of
withholding because of paranoia.
Dar
Shelton
